Parallels BUSINESS AUTOMATION Getting Started Guide

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Parallels

Parallels Business Automation - Standard

Getting Started Guide

Release 4.0

Printed: 12/23/2010

Contents

Preface 6

Typographical Conventions......................................................................................................................... 6

Feedback...................................................................................................................................................... 7

About This Guide......................................................................................................................................... 7

Audience...................................................................................................................................................... 7

Meet the Parallels Business Automation - Standard 8

Parallels Business Automation - Standard Advantages................................................................................8

Parallels Business Automation - Standard Deployment Scenario.............................................................. 11

Parallels Business Automation - Standard Interface Features.................................................................... 11

Navigation.................................................................................................................................................. 11

Main Screen ............................................................................................................................................... 12

Adding a Comment to the Parallels Business Automation - Standard Object............................................13

Parallels Business Automation - Standard Tools.......................................................................................13

Browsers Compatible with Parallels Business Automation - Standard...................................................... 15

Starting HSP Business with Parallels Business Automation - Standard 16

Connecting to Parallels Business Automation - Standard Browser-Based Tools ......................................17

Initial Settings............................................................................................................................................ 19

Getting Acquainted with Provider Control Center..................................................................................... 22

Looking into Reseller Control Center........................................................................................................25

Inspecting Customer Control Panel............................................................................................................26

Registering Users and Setting Access Permissions.................................................................................... 28

Configuring Data Center and Connecting Hardware.................................................................................31

Setting Up Domains Registration ................................................................................................... 33

Allocating IP Addresses.................................................................................................................. 35

Establishing Connection with Hardware......................................................................................... 36

Getting Ready to Sell Hosting Services..................................................................................................... 37

Basic Notions Used in Parallels Business Automation - Standard Billing......................................38

Setting Up Billing........................................................................................................................... 40

Creating Hosting Plans ................................................................................................................... 41

Securing Parallels Business Automation - Standard Tools Using SSL........................................... 42

Configuring Payment Pug-Ins......................................................................................................... 43

Configuring Online Store................................................................................................................ 44

Going Live................................................................................................................................................. 46

What's Next? 48

Managing Receivables...............................................................................................................................48

Supervising the Cash Flow......................................................................................................................... 49

Monitoring the Data Center Resources Usage...........................................................................................51

Checking the Licenses Usage..................................................................................................................... 52

Daily Activities.......................................................................................................................................... 52

Getting Technical Support 56

An Overview of Parallels Technical Support............................................................................................. 56

Questions for Technical Support................................................................................................................ 56

How to Send Support Questions................................................................................................................ 57

Index 59

Printed: 12/23/2010

Parallels Holdings, Ltd. c/o Parallels International GMbH. Parallels International GmbH Vordergasse 49 CH - 8200 Schaffhausen Switzerland Tel: + 49 (6151) 42996 - 0 Fax: + 49 (6151) 42996 - 255

Copyright © 1999-2010 by Parallels Holdings Ltd. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. This product is protected by United States and international copyright laws. The product's underlying technology, patents, and trademarks are listed at http://www.parallels.com/trademarks Microsoft, Windows, Windows Server, Windows NT, Windows Vista, and MS-DOS are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporatio n. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Mac is a registered trademark of Apple, Inc. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

C HAPTER 1

Preface

In This Chapter

Typographical Conventions.................................................................................................. 6

Feedback ...............................................................................................................................7

About This Guide..................................................................................................................7

Audience ...............................................................................................................................7

Typographical Conventions

Before you start using this guide, it is important to understand the documentation conventions used in it.

The following kinds of formatting in the text identify special information.

Formatting convention Type of Information Example

Special Bold

Italics Used to emphasize the

Monospace

Items you must select, such as menu options, command buttons, or items in a list.

Titles of chapters, sections, and subsections.

importance of a point, to introduce a term or to designate a command line placeholder, which is to be replaced with a real name or value.

The names of commands, files, directories, and domain names.

Go to the System tab.

Read the Basic Administration chapter.

The system supports the so called wildcard character search.

The license file is located in the

http://docs/common/ licenses directory.

Preface 7

Preformatted

Preformatted Bold

CAPITALS Names of keys on the

KEY+KEY Key combinations for which

On-screen computer output in your command-line sessions; source code in XML, C++, or other programming languages.

What you type, contrasted with on-screen computer output.

keyboard.

the user must press and hold down one key and then press another.

# ls –al /files

total 14470

# cd /root/rpms/php

SHIFT, CTRL, ALT

CTRL+P, ALT+F4

Feedback

If you have found a mistake in this guide, or if you have suggestions or ideas on how to improve this guide, please send your feedback using the online form at http://www.parallels.com/en/support/usersdoc/. Please include in your report the guide's title, chapter and section titles, and the fragment of text in which you have found an error.

About This Guide

This Guide describes the most important and frequently-used Parallels Business Automation Standard working scenarios including initial settings for the system.

Note: The PDF-version of this Guide is an overview of the Parallels Business Automation Standard overall functionality and is not to be used as a thorough howto. For details see contextsensitive HTML help (the Help link at the upper right corner of every screen).

Audience

This guide is addressed to Hosting Service Providers and helps both to evaluate the product and get acquainted with Parallels Business Automation - Standard.

C HAPTER 2

Meet the Parallels Business Automation Standard

Parallels Business Automation - Standard is an end-to-end solution for hosting service providers (HSPs) and Internet Data Centers covering full life-cycle of HSP/IDC operations. Parallels Business Automation - Standard allows HSPs to drastically decrease the cost of operating hosting business while increasing revenues, developing new reseller channels, and improving usage of hardware and personnel resources.

In This Chapter

Parallels Business Automation - Standard Advantages ........................................................8

Parallels Business Automation - Standard Deployment Scenario......................................... 11

Parallels Business Automation - Standard Interface Features............................................... 11

Parallels Business Automation - Standard Tools..................................................................13

Browsers Compatible with Parallels Business Automation - Standard.................................15

Parallels Business Automation Standard Advantages

Parallels Business Automation - Standard includes everything a company needs to run a successful and profitable hosting business from advanced technology and tools to manage your servers and overall infrastructure to billing, sales channel management, and e-commerce application:

 The full range of services supported:

 Domain registration  Plesk Domain hosting  Virtuozzo Container hosting  Parallels Plesk Control Panel

and Parallels Plesk Sitebuilder licenses

 Parallels Plesk Sitebuilder

support

 Dedicated servers for resellers  Dedicated or Co-location  Miscellaneous

Meet the Parallels Business Automation - Standard 9

 Complete infrastructure management:

 Powerful Container

management

 IPs allocation and DNS

administration

 Flexible self-provisioning

 Server-/client-side backups  Integrated trouble ticketing and

External Helpdesks support

 Maintenance automation and

 Integrated complete billing solution:

 Customizable online store  Country-specific accounting  Automated recurring invoicing  Private label resellers

 Discounts, promotions, coupon

codes

 Taxation with tax exemption  Automated upgrades/downgrades  Customizable notifications and

 Credit Cards processing through over 30 payment gateways (new added

monthly):

 integrated with fraud screening  flexible manual approval rules  refunds, reversals, credits

 sensitive data is encrypted  delayed capture  CVV/AVS verification and more

Meet the Parallels Business Automation - Standard 10

 Bank transfer payments for German (DTAUS), Spanish (Norma 19), and Netherlands

(ClieOp3) standards: flexible batch management with approval queues.

 Domain registrations through over 25 domain registrars (new added

monthly):

 Wide range of Operating Systems and Applications for Container hosting:

 Centralized management  Automated upgrades  Over 50 applications

 Easy customization and integration:

 Customizable PHP based store  Notifications customization  Customizable menu items  Colors, logos, page content  Create your own plug-ins

 Redhat, Fedora, Suse, Debian  Open-source and commercial

applications

 Game servers and more

 Application templates creation

guide

 Powerful API  Advanced multi-language

support

 XML data export/import tools

 Everything in one box!

Meet the Parallels Business Automation - Standard 11

Parallels Business Automation Standard Deployment Scenario

Parallels Business Automation - Standard can be successfully installed both on the physical server or (if you use the Parallels Virtuozzo Containers technology) in Virtuozzo Container.

The computer (or virtual server) that runs Parallels Business Automation - Standard is called Management Node in terms of Parallels Business Automation - Standard. The servers that run software that provides hosting services (run Virtuozzo Containers, Plesk Domains, or some other third-party software) are called Hardware Nodes or just Nodes. Parallels Business Automation - Standard administrator can connect to the Management Node via the Internet and guide the hosting business using the web-based interface.

Parallels Business Automation Standard Interface Features

Navigation

To use one or another Parallels Business Automation - Standard component or tool, please use the namespace tree located in the left pane.

Control Centers specific:

You can hide/display the namespace tree by clicking on the slider at the vertical bar that separates the left and the right parts of the screen.

Meet the Parallels Business Automation - Standard 12

When you start your Parallels Business Automation - Standard session, the path (chain of links) appears at the top of the screen. These links provide the "breadcrumb navigation" and show you the path to your actual location within the Parallels Business Automation - Standard. By clicking on these links, you can be one or more (depending on your location) levels up.

Main Screen

The right pane of Parallels Business Automation - Standard screen serves for operating components selected from the namespace tree. The main screen shows the Parallels Business Automation - Standard Directors' or Managers' dashboards, lists of objects, single objects' properties, or other related data.

Each Parallels Business Automation - Standard component (Director or Manager) has its own dashboard. Moreover, the Parallels Business Automation - Standard has its dashboard that may be considered as 30,000-foot view of tools and operations. So, a dashboard is the Parallels Business Automation - Standard component 'front-page' that provides you with the most important statistics and a place to start including:

 Shortcuts to the lists of objects.  Information about the number of objects with separate counters for the objects in different

states like Active Accounts, Accounts on Hold, Running Containers, etc.

 Shortcuts for the creation of new objects that fall into the functionality of Parallels Business

Automation - Standard component selected.

To facilitate operating the lists of objects you can use:  Search particular item within the list or filter the items by a particular property. The Search

and filter bar is located at the top of each list.

 Hide/Show search and filter bars, action bars, tables and create/edit forms sections. Their

hide/show status is retained throughout the session.

 Change Sorting Order. To this effect, click on the column-heading you want to sort by. In

this case, the special pointer (small triangle) appears at the top of each column. This triangle indicates current sorting order: peak-up or peak-down for ascending and descending order respectively. Repeating click on the same link in column-heading changes sorting order from ascending to descending (and conversely) within single property.

 Change List Size. It is possible to set the listing to 20, 40, or 80 items per page. Appropriate

links are above the list, to the right. Special links for viewing pages (page numbers, next,last) are also provided and you can find them both at the beginning and the end of the list.

 Export lists to Excel. Parallels Business Automation - Standard allows you to export data

from any list in Parallels Business Automation - Standard to Excel, thus facilitating data operations. The information is exported from the whole list, not only from the visible part. For example, if you have set the listing to 40 items per page and the whole list includes 100

entries, you will get an excel format document covering 100 items. The icon is located above and under the lists.

 Set columns visibility. You can choose the columns to be displayed in the list tables by

clicking on the entries in the drop-down menu. You are also allowed to set the columns order by drag-anddropping the column titles.

icon above and under the list and enabling/disabling the corresponding

Export to Excel

Meet the Parallels Business Automation - Standard 13

In order to immediately bring the screen content in correspondence with actual state of affairs, you can Refresh the screen using the button located at the upper right corner of the screen.

The Help button located at the upper right corner of each screen shows the context-sensitive HTML help.

Screen ID is located at the upper-right corner of each screen. Screen ID allows to refer to a screen for customization purposes or in the problem report. In addition, each screen ID is a clickable link that leads the the Screens Viewer and allows getting a screen alias immediately.

Adding a Comment to the Parallels Business Automation - Standard Object

You can add a free-form comment to almost any of Parallels Business Automation - Standard object. To this effect click on the Add comment link at the upper-right corner of an object view form.

Parallels Business Automation Standard Tools

Parallels Business Automation - Standard modular design consists of four main subsystems each with web-based tools to manage a part of hosting service provider business:

 Provider Control Center (HSP GUI). Browser-based tool for the Hosting Service

Provider. Includes the customizable online store and front-end website. Provider Control Center allows managing all the Parallels Business Automation - Standard tools and supervising Resellers' online stores. In addition a Provider can log in to any Reseller Control Center or any of Provider's customers' Control Panels.

 Reseller Control Center (Reseller GUI). Browser-based tool for the reseller. Provides

access to the functionality of Parallels Business Automation - Standard components (directors and managers) available for the reseller plus customizable online store and frontend website.

Note: Each Control Center allows hosting services provisioning with access to the Parallels Business Automation - Standard Control Panel.

Meet the Parallels Business Automation - Standard 14

 Customer Control Panel. Parallels Business Automation - Standard Control Panel is a

browser-based tool that allows a customer to manage his (or her) account and buy services using the Control Panel Upgrade Center. Without respect to existence of subscriptions and services purchased, the Control Panel is available by default for all persons that have Parallels Business Automation - Standard Accounts of "customer" type.

In addition there are three task-oriented sets of tools that alow a customer to build a website, or perform system administration tasks (manage Virtuozzo Container or Plesk domain), or create end-users with ability for such a user to manage both a mailbox and home directory via the special browser-based tool. These sets of tools are also called Control Panels and sold as applications included in hosting plans:

 Workgroup Administrator Control Panel (WACP). An application that includes tools

for small company administrator or workgroup administrator (or workgroup users without the dedicated administrator). It hides from the user the complexity of server administration and allows users without deep system administration knowledge to perform simple tasks like mail management and website deployment.

 System Administrator Control Panel (SACP). An application for the system

administrator that allows managing Container. Users should have the basic system administration knowledge. SACP allows a customer to configure Container services and users, configure mail, manage databases.

 My Control Panel (MyCP). My Control Panel is sold as an application within a hosting

plan and provides access for Container or Plesk domain users to the browser-based enduser tool that allows managing user personal information, configuring e-mail autoresponders, configuring mail forwarding to an external address, both uploading and managing files in user home directory.

Note: It is possible to integrate the custom e-commerce solutions with Parallels Business Automation - Standard using the API provided. For more details on customization, please refer to the Parallels Business Automation - Standard Integration Guide.

Meet the Parallels Business Automation - Standard 15

Browsers Compatible with Parallels Business Automation - Standard

The following browsers are fully compatible with Parallels Business Automation - Standard web-based tools:

For IBM PC compatible computers:

 Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5, 6.0 and above,  Netscape Navigator 7.0 and above,  Opera 7.5.3 and above,  Mozilla 1.5 and above,  Firefox 1.0 and above.  Google Chrome 8.

For Macintosh:

 Safari 1.3 and above,  Microsoft Internet Explorer for Mac 5.2,  Opera 8.5  Mozilla/Firefox 1.07.

C HAPTER 3

Starting HSP Business with Parallels Business Automation - Standard

Using the Parallels Business Automation - Standard tools you can compose service packages called Hosting Plans and publish these offerings in your e-commerce store. Services are provided automatically for accounts with credit limit not exceeded.

The Parallels Business Automation - Standard allows providing a wide range of hosting services:

 Dedicated (physical server):

 Virtuozzo - physical server with Parallels Virtuozzo Containers installed and ability to

create virtual private servers and sell them to customers. Parallels Virtuozzo Containers dedicated hosting can be provided both to Enterprise Customers and Resellers. Provider can manage a Hardware Node on the system level plus fully automated billing is provided.

 Plesk - physical server with Plesk Server Administrator software installed.  Plesk server in Container that behaves exactly as a stand-alone physical Plesk server.  Physical server with an arbitrary software installed. In this case, a Provider can bill the

customer that have bought the server and manage the dedicated subscription, but it is not possible to manage this server on the system level using the Provider Control Center tools.

 Container

 Virtuozzo Container (with root access or without root access) that behaves just like a

standalone physical server.

 Name-based Virtuozzo Container. Virtuozzo name-based hosting is a Container-related

implementation of a well-known technique of name-based web hosting, implemented, for example, in the Apache web server. Virtuozzo name-based hosting enables the Hardware Node administrator to provide a single external IP address for all or a number of Containers hosted on that Node.

 Shared:

 Plesk Shared (Plesk Domain) with ability to create website, upload files and images,

manage mail and database.

 Plesk Multi Domain:

 Plesk Client account with ability to create and manage Plesk Domains.

Starting HSP Business with Parallels Business Automation - Standard 17

 Domain Registration  Miscellaneous (custom and non-hosting services). Note that you can add custom services

that can be billed or not (for example, support) to any of hosting plans.

 One-Time Fee Item. Special hosting plan type that allows one-time purchase without

subscription creation and without any further recurring payments.

More information about Parallels Business Automation - Standard and its many features is available in the Parallels Business Automation - Standard Provider's Guide.

In This Chapter

Connecting to Parallels Business Automation - Standard Browser-Based Tools.................17

Initial Settings ....................................................................................................................... 19

Getting Acquainted with Provider Control Center................................................................ 22

Looking into Reseller Control Center...................................................................................25

Inspecting Customer Control Panel.......................................................................................26

Registering Users and Setting Access Permissions............................................................... 28

Configuring Data Center and Connecting Hardware............................................................31

Getting Ready to Sell Hosting Services................................................................................37

Going Live ............................................................................................................................ 46

Connecting to Parallels Business Automation - Standard BrowserBased Tools

To connect to the Parallels Business Automation - Standard tools, enter into your browser the Management Node hostname and append the tool index (http://hostname/index):

Tool Tool index

Public Site Online Store Provider Control Center pcc Reseller Control Center rcc Customer Control Panel cp

Starting HSP Business with Parallels Business Automation - Standard 18

The SSL protocol can be enabled from Provider Control Center, separately for each of Parallels Business Automation - Standard web-based tools. The SSL configuration is available both in Provider and Reseller Control Centers.

Your first Parallels Business Automation - Standard session starts from the Provider Control Center. After you make some initial settings to Parallels Business Automation - Standard, you can log in to any of the other tools.

After you connect to the Parallels Business Automation - Standard Provider Control Center, you will be prompted for login and password. Enter the default login and password generated by the Parallels Business Automation - Standard installer. The default is an e-mail like root@your_management_node_hostname (in actual login your_management_node_hostname must be replaced with an actual hostname of the computer that runs Parallels Business Automation - Standard, i.e., the Management Node) and the password is generated in a random way by the Parallels Business Automation - Standard installer.

Starting HSP Business with Parallels Business Automation - Standard 19

Initial Settings

When you log in to Parallels Business Automation - Standard Control Center for the first time, the Initial Setup Wizard will help you to make the settings required for Parallels Business Automation - Standard initial configuration.

The Wizard starts with the User Agreement approval and then step-by-step helps you to make the basic initial settings that form the working background for the Parallels Business Automation - Standard Control Center.

We shortly describe the basic steps of Initial Setup to help you understand how the settings made by you will be used, why they are important and how you can adjust these settings later.

Person & Account. Adjusting your Hosting Company Requisites and Making SystemWide Regional Settings

The correct and fully specified administrative account contacts are important, for example for successful domains registration requested for your own using the Parallels Business Automation

- Standard domain registration plug-ins since this information is usually passed to domain registrars via plug-in interface. Later you can adjust your administrative account profile by clicking the topmost menu item in the left frame of Provider Control Center and selecting the Company Profile or Contacts tab.

The default language is used by default in your online store. Default time zone is applied to new accounts created in store by your customers. The first day of week used in billing reports. The default currency setup is important for billing. Later you can change these settings in Configuration Director > Miscellaneous Settings > Regional Settings.

License. Installing Parallels Business Automation - Standard License

The Parallels Business Automation - Standard Licence defines:  The number of users registered in your administrative account (your staff members) that can

concurrently log in to the Provider Control Center.

 The maximal number of reseller accounts you can register.  The maximal number of customer accounts you can register.

Parallels Business Automation - Standard trial license is shipped together with Parallels Business Automation - Standard distribution. You can install the real license during Initial Setup or later, using the Configuration Director > License Manager.

Data Center. Setting Up Domains Registration

This step of Initial Setup allows you to configure the testing environment for domains registration and allocate IP addresses. More IP addresses (IP pools) can be registered in Service Director > IP Manager.

The default domain is allowed for subdomains registration in your online store.

Parallels Business Automation - Standard offers more than 20 domain registration plug-in templates and you can configure domain pug-ins later in Service Director > Domain Manager.

Starting HSP Business with Parallels Business Automation - Standard 20

More name servers cane be registered later in Service Director > Domain Manager.

Allocate IP pools for the basic types of hosting plans. IP addresses allocation can be adjusted later under Service Director > IP Manager.

Billing. Setting Up Billing System

The initial billing settings include:  Setting the default settlement conditions for customers. Settlement conditions are defined by

credit terms. Credit terms are set per account. The default credit terms are assigned by default to accounts created by your customers from your online store. Later you can add more credit terms using the Account Director > Subscription Manager > Credit Terms. Settlement conditions for resellers are defined by a special complex setting called Partner Level. Partner level define both credit terms and a special reseller discount. Partner levels are assigned per reseller account and can be added later using the Billing Director > Discount Manager > Partner Levels.

 Setting the default tax rates and enabling taxation system-wide. Tax rates in Parallels

Business Automation - Standard can be assigned either by a customer country or an account. Tax rates (one or more) are grouped by tax zones. Tax zone holds the information about a customer country (specified in a customer account profile) or account(s) to apply tax rates specified for this tax zone. The default tax zone matches all accounts/countries that do not have any special tax zone defined. Please note that for the fresh installation the default tax zone is already created and the initial setup offers you to set up to two tax rates for the default tax zone. Later you can add more tax rates and create more tax zones as well as set up tax exemption using the Billing Director > Taxation Manager.

 Setting up credit cards and bank accounts processing. To process delayed online payments,

use recurring payments, and store bank accounts data (to generate batches) you must configure encryption, i.e., upload a key pair. The Initial setup allows generating a self-signed key pair, which is enough for testing. Later you can upload the signed keys using the Commerce Director > Payment Processing > Secure Storage.

Warning: If you are planning to use the self-signed keys for some time, it is strongly recommended to save the keys so you could upload them in case the keys will be unintentionally wiped out or corrupted. You can do this on the next step of Initial Setup.

Starting HSP Business with Parallels Business Automation - Standard 21

 Creating sample hosting plans of the basic types. Sample hosting plans creation allows you

to save time and start system testing immediately after completing the initial setup. You can add new hosting plans in the Billing Director > Product Manager > Hosting Plans.

Store & Site. Making Basic Website Settings  Interface Setup. Skin is palette and images used for interface. Select the default skin that

will pre-fill the relevant field in the New user forms (a skins is a personal setting and is assigned per registered user) and will be applied to your online store and other website pages. Later you can upload more images and files you would like to publish at your website using the Marketing Director > Site Manager. In addition, the standard set of images used in the Parallels Business Automation - Standard interface can be updated using the Marketing

Director > Brand Manager > Skins. Files and images can be uploaded using the Images and Files option under the Brand Manager.

 Store Setup. You can open the online store right away. To this effect, check the Store is

open box. Later you can open/close the store, adjust hosting plans listing, and enter a referral

question using the Commerce Director > Store Manager > Configure Store. Later you can also upload files and images using the File Manager located under the Store Manager. Other store customization is done by editing store files (please refer to the Parallels Business Automation - Standard SDK for details).

Trouble Ticketing

Parallels Business Automation - Standard provides an integrated trouble ticketing system that allows reporting and answering customers' problems directly through the interface and by email.

The Initial Setup Wizard allows configuring the built-in Trouble Ticket System.

If you do not want to use the built-in trouble ticket system or you need some additional helpdesk features not supported by the built-in system, you can use one of the external helpdesks integrated with Parallels Business Automation - Standard:

 Cerberus Helpdesk or  Kayako SupportSuite.

The API provided (see the Parallels Business Automation - Standard SDK for details) allows you to integrate more external helpdesks.

Starting HSP Business with Parallels Business Automation - Standard 22

Getting Acquainted with Provider Control Center

The Provider Control Center offers a wide set of tools, which are grouped into seven main sets, called Directors each of them includes the specific subset of tools called Managers. Managers, in their turn, include one or more specific options in their submenus. You can move from one Director or Manager to another using the namespace tree in the left frame.

Below we describe all directors more in details.

Account Director

Account Director provides functionality for customer accounts management, partner/reseller enrollment and management, subscriptions overview, credit terms setup, customer care:

Service Director

Service Director allows allocating IP addresses for HSPs data center, supervising resources usage, and managing all types of services a HSP can sell using the Parallels Business Automation - Standard solution: Virtuozzo Containers, Plesk Domains and Clients, Sitebuilder add-ons, physical servers, domains, both Parallels Plesk Control Panel and Parallels Plesk Sitebuilder Licenses:

Starting HSP Business with Parallels Business Automation - Standard 23

Billing Director

Billing Director provides a complete accounting system for HSPs business: actual HSPs balance and customers/resellers accounts balance, receivables management, pricing tools including promotions, discounts, and taxation, default prices for service offerings, hosing plans management, revenue reports, country-specific accounting, system-wide billing setup:

Commerce Director

Commerce Director serves for everything connected with payments: credit card payment plugins and tools for online payments approval, bank transfer plug-ins and batch processing, transaction log, payments processing setup and encryption for credit cards/bank accounts private data, recurring billing, fraud protection, basic settings for online store (open/close store, compose hosting plan listing, set up referral question) and customer subscriptions upgrades setup:

Marketing Director

Marketing Director provides partners management tools including the ability of both manual and automated online marketing campaigns creation and viewing campaigns revenue reports, mass mail sending tool, tools for HSPs website configuration and branding:

Starting HSP Business with Parallels Business Automation - Standard 24

Configuration Director

Configuration Director serves for Parallels Business Automation - Standard system-wide configuration: access permissions for HSP staff and other registered users, internal licensing for Provider needs, events setup, miscellaneous settings (SSL setup, data retention cycle, messenger, language/currency, etc.), check for available updates, logging ( Parallels Business Automation - Standard vital services monitor, action and e-mail logs, problem viewer, screens viewer):

Migration Director

Migration Director provides tools for data migration into and outside Parallels Business Automation - Standard, including XML export/import. In addition a special tool for data conflicts resolving is provided:

Starting HSP Business with Parallels Business Automation - Standard 25

Looking into Reseller Control Center

In this paragraph we describe just several peculiarities of RCC as an example that can help you to understand how Provider and Reseller cooperate. For more information, please refer to the Parallels Business Automation - Standard documentation.

If you would like to take a look at Parallels Business Automation - Standard from reseller point of view, you should log in to the Provider Control Center and create a reseller account using the Account Director > Reseller Manager > Resellers. Then the simplest way to log in to the Reseller Control Center on behalf of this account is to click on the newly created reseller account name, make sure that the General Settings tab is selected and click the Login to RCC button. The existing login/password will be accepted without the need for you to enter them and the RCC will open in a new browser window.

For the first logging in the Reseller Control Center you will have to pass the Initial Setup Wizard, similarly to how it was when you have logged in to the Provider Control Center. After the initial setup is finished, the Reseller Control Center appears.

At the first sight, Reseller Control Center looks like Provider one.

However, reseller has less tools then Provider (less tools in Managers under Parallels Business Automation - Standard Directors).

Actually, the availability of different tools for Reseller is subject to the access permissions set in the Provider Control Center for resellers. To see how it works, you can get back to the browser window with Provider Control Center, go to the Configuration Director > Security Manager > Setup select the Reseller Permissions tab and clear some boxes under the Reseller Administrator permissions. Save settings, get back to the RCC and refresh the screen. You will see that the set of tools available for reseller has changed.

In addition, there are some differences in billing. Open the Billing Director submenu in Provider Control Center. Provider manages receivables only. And in RCC there are two links - Receivable and Payable. Receivable is for settlements with reseller customers. And Payable is for settlements between reseller and provider. When reseller accepts payment from a customer, the corresponding automatically-issued Provider's invoice falls into the Payables. If a Reseller buys a hosting plan in Provider store, then the corresponding order (and invoice) can be found in Payables in RCC as well.

Starting HSP Business with Parallels Business Automation - Standard 26

Inspecting Customer Control Panel

To take a look at the customer Control Panel (hereinafter, CP), you should first log into the Provider Control Center and create a customer account using the Account Director - Customer Manager - Customers. Then select the newly created account from the list, click either the General Settings or Users tab and then click the Login to CP button. The existing login/password will be accepted without the need for you to enter them and the CP will open in the new browser window.

If a Virtuozzo subscription exists for an account, then the Control Panel includes the set of tools provided in Parallels Business Automation - Standard specially for Containers. For Plesk subscriptions the Parallels Business Automation - Standard Control Panel shows the Parallels Plesk Control Panel in the right frame.

For the 'empty' customer account without any subscriptions on it you will see less tabs, and we describe this below.

The CP screen is roughly divided into two panes: the menu to the left and the dashboard to the right. In general, the set of icons (or links) at the Control Panel dashboard duplicates the main menu functionality. However, the main menu shall be considered as the main navigation tool since it always shows the full set of control tools that correspond to the tab selected, without respect to what is going on at the dashboard. And Control Panel dashboard serves as operating tool.

The CP interface is task oriented: you do not need to have all the links and icons displayed all the time. Please, click the tabs at the top of the screen to switch to the needed set of tools (zone).

The CP interface corresponds to the services included in the subscription on a customer account. If there are no subscriptions, then CP allows managing account, buying more services, and reading user documentation.

Thus, for the fresh installation and without any subscription on your account, you will see the following CP tabs:

 My Account. Everything connected with managing your Parallels Business Automation -

Standard account and subscriptions: here a customer can check his (or her) account balance, manage financial documents (view invoices, pay orders, etc.), and edit the personal user settings (like password, account contacts, etc.).

 Help. Useful information for a customer about FTP, SSH, or e-mail settings and access to

user documentation. In addition, here a customer can port problem reports if the Trouble Ticker System in enabled by Provider from PCC.

Other tabs appear if a subscription is registered for an account:

 Site. Create and configure websites, manage mail (for Container subscriptions).  System. For Container and Plesk domains. Manage users and groups, configure services,

manage databases, manage domains, and add/remove applications.

 Upgrade Center. Here a customer can upgrade the current Hosting Plan, or buy a new one. To look inside the Parallels Business Automation - Standard end-user tool designed for

Virtuozzo Container users, you need to register at least one Virtuozzo server and create a Virtuozzo Container subscription for your testing account.

Starting HSP Business with Parallels Business Automation - Standard 27

 If you want to log in to the My Control Panel:

1. In the Control Panel, go to the System tab, click the Users icon and create a user. Do not

forget to set password (you will use this password to log in to MyCP). Another way to add a user (if the Workgroup Administrator Control Panel is installed) is go to the Site tab and create a mailbox.

2. Loging in to the My Control Panel as this described earlier in this guide.

3. When the Sign In form appears: a Into the E-mail field enter the e-mail of a user created before, in the Control Panel. The e-

mail should be the following user-login@system-hostname where user-login should be replaced with the user name and system-hostname is the hostname of the Virtuozzo Container or Plesk domain.

b Into the Password field type the user password. c Click the Sign In button.

The My Control Panel screen is organized similarly to the Control Panel. The menu in the left frame, main screen to the right. However there are less tools, only the necessary things:

 Personal Profile editor with ability for a user to enter the full name (just to personalize the

interface, without reference to login credentials) and change personal password.

 File Manager to manage the user home directory.  Mail Manager with ability to set mail forwarding.

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Registering Users and Setting Access Permissions

Every registered user to log in to Parallels Business Automation - Standard must have particular permissions to get access to particular Parallels Business Automation - Standard tools. It is possible to set permissions only if a user is associated with a particular account. Users that are not associated with at least one account cannot log in to Parallels Business Automation Standard tools.

In Parallels Business Automation - Standard, editable access permissions are set for Control Center users only. Customers that have access to Control Panel can gain only one role (Customer Administrator) that allows working in Control Panel and in this case the set of tools available depends on the applications included in customer's subscription, but not on the role.

For the clean installation, there is a set of default roles both for Provider and Reseller staff members (i.e., registered users under Provider or Reseller account).

Provider can edit access permissions for every role and add a new roles both for Provider staff members and Reseller staff members in Configuration Director - Security Manager - Setup.

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Figure 1: Provider Control Center. Setting Access Permissions per user roles.

The Permissions set at the screen follows the components tree at the left frame. Thus, to grant access to one or another component, check the box next to its name. To grant access to a particular component within a Director, open its submenu and check the boxes next to a component name. Checking the box next to a Director name grants access to all components within this Director.

Special Permissions are not bound to any component, but grant the right to perform some special operations. To grant additional permission, check the box next to its name.

Resellers can only view the access permissions set for each Reseller staff role. Basic Notions

Users

Users (staff members, customers, and resellers) permissions are identified by Accounts. Each person may be associated with several Accounts and may have different sets of access permissions within different Accounts. Staff members are users registered within the Provider Account.

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User Roles

Roles are assigned to a User within Accounts. A Role defines the set of tools accessible by one or another login/password pair. A Role includes a set of access permissions to the Parallels Business Automation - Standard tools. In the Parallels Business Automation - Standard there are three customizable roles for Provider staff members and three - for Reseller staff members. The set of permissions in each Role is defined by Provider. Customers get the default and noncustomizable role of Control Panel Administrator.

Permissions

Permissions are assigned per Role, not per individual user. Permissions are assigned separately to Roles available for HSP staff members and Resellers.

How Permissions Control is Organized

Only Provider can edit access permissions from the Parallels Business Automation - Standard Provider control Canter. And the Reseller Control Center allows Resellers to view permissions set for Reseller staff members roles (Operations Administrator, Sales and Marketing, Accountant, etc.) by Provider.

Resellers can read this section to get acquainted with the Parallels Business Automation Standard security model and the mechanism of roles assignment.

Account is the basic Parallels Business Automation - Standard security notion. All operations performed within the system are connected with different Accounts. A person registered within an Account can gain the certain access permissions to Parallels Business Automation - Standard tools, depending on the type of Account.

The following Account types exist within Parallels Business Automation - Standard system:  Provider Account (only one Account of such type can exist within your Parallels Business

Automation - Standard system). This Account is created during the Parallels Business Automation - Standard installation. All persons associated with Provider Account are considered as Provider staff members with particular access permissions to Parallels Business Automation - Standard Provider Control Center. The number of Provider staff members that can concurrently log in to the Provider Control Center is defined by the Parallels Business Automation - Standard license. Provider staff members are managed separately using the Configuration Director > Security Manager > Staff Members.

 Reseller Account. Reseller Accounts are registered using the Account Director > Reseller

Manager. The number of Reseller Accounts is defined in the Parallels Business Automation -

Standard License. All persons associated with Reseller Account are considered as Reseller staff members and can be granted a particular role (i.e., access permissions) within Parallels Business Automation - Standard Reseller Control Center.

 Customer Account. Customer Accounts are registered using the Account Director >

Customer Manager. Customer Accounts can be of two types: personal or business. All

persons associated with Customer Account have access to Parallels Business Automation Standard Control Panels;

Access permissions per user role can be set in the Configuration Director > Security Manager.

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Configuring Data Center and Connecting Hardware

The tools for your Data Center management are collected under the Service Director.

In spite of the fact that Parallels Business Automation - Standard operates the virtual-server farm, a Data Center should be understood in common sense, i.e., as a centralized storage facility to retain database information related to decision-making processes.

In general, Parallels Business Automation - Standard Data Center activity includes the following:

 Servers (Nodes) management.  DNS and IP addresses management.  Service level management.

The hardware configuration to run Parallels Business Automation - Standard includes one computer for Management Node and two or more computers for Hardware Nodes.

A Management Node is a computer (or a specially configured Virtuozzo Container) used for management. It runs services for web-based management interface and the database containing information about customers and services. The Management Node also establishes connection with domain registrars and payment gates.

A Hardware Node is a computer that runs the software (Virtuozzo, Plesk, etc.) that provides services for customers or a third-party software (server lease, collocation or dedicated hosting).

Dedicated third-party servers can be grouped into racks. A rack in Parallels Business Automation - Standard is a logical container, it is just a record in the Parallels Business Automation - Standard database. Logical racks can follow the actual servers grouping at your Data Center.

The Parallels Business Automation - Standard Data Center management tools allow managing the following servers:

 Servers that run Parallels Plesk Control Panel that can be used for Plesk Domains or Clients

provisioning for customers and sold as dedicated servers. Plesk servers can also be installed inside Virtuozzo Containers.

 Servers that run Parallels Virtuozzo Containers that can be used for Virtuozzo Containers

provisioning for customers and sold as dedicated servers.

 Servers that run Parallels Server Bare Metal that can be used for Virtual Machines

provisioning.

 Servers that run Parallels Plesk Sitebuilder allowing a HSP to sell Sitebuilder services.  Third-party servers (server lease, collocation, dedicated servers). These servers cannot be

managed directly from the Parallels Business Automation - Standard web-based interface, but in this case, the Parallels Business Automation - Standard takes care of all the billing matters including creation of dedicated subscription, charging a customer, issuing the renewal order, sending notifications, etc.

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In Parallels Business Automation - Standard, the Virtuozzo, Plesk, or Sitebuilder servers are called Nodes. And third-party servers are called Servers.

Nodes and third-party servers can be registered and managed using the Service Director and, depending on a server designation, using the Plesk Manager, Virtuozzo Manager, Parallels Server

Manager, Sitebuilder Manager, or Servers Manager for Plesk, Virtuozzo, Parallels Server Bare Metal, Sitebuilder, or third-party servers respectively.

Virtual Plesk Nodes (Parallels Plesk Control Panel installed inside a Virtuozzo Container) are registered automatically as the Plesk nodes, after the Plesk Virtual Node subscription is activated.

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Setting Up Domains Registration

DNS and domains management tools are grouped under Service Director > Domain Manager.

Name Servers Registration

Name servers in Parallels Business Automation - Standard are managed by name servers sets. One name servers set is specified as a default one.

For the fresh Parallels Business Automation - Standard installation, by default you have two Provider name servers (primary and secondary) grouped into one set - the default name servers set. Both name servers are configured at the Management Node. It is quite enough to start.

You can use the default name servers set or you can add more name servers and create more name servers sets.

It is possible to install and configure name servers directly from the Provider Control Center web-based interface.

To specify one of another name server for domain registration, you need to register name server(s) in Domain Manager > Name Servers and then group them in several name server sets.

The default name servers set can be selected in the Service Director > Domain Manager > Setup.

Name servers used for domains registration are assigned in Domain Registration hosting plans. When you create a Domain Registration hosting plan, you select a name servers set.

Domain Registration Plug-Ins Configuration

Parallels offers a set of plug-ins for establishing a connection with the domain registrars and registries, so you only need to enter the necessary information into simple forms. Please note that in this case, you should open the Account with the registrars where you want to register your domains and receive your own logins, private keys and other data, depending on the Registrar's internal rules.

Domain registration plug-ins are shipped as RPM modules independent from Parallels Business Automation - Standard functionality.

The full list of domain registration plug-ins is available at the official Parallels website (http://www.parallels.com/en/products/

After installation, a plug-in becomes available in Parallels Business Automation - Standard as a selectable type for a new domain registration plug-in configuration.

hspcomplete/templates/domain/).

 Adding a Domain Registration Plug-In Configuration To add a domain registration plug-in based on one of a standard configurations, it is enough to

go to Service Director > Domain Manager > Plug-ins, click New Plug-in, enter a new plug-in configuration name and select a configuration type. After this, a plug-in configuration form appears on the screen. The only thing to do after this - fill the form and save the configuration. The number of plug-ins that can be added on the basis of the same standard configuration is not limited.

After you set plug-ins, you need to define which TLDs to register in each plug-in and set prices.

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 Adding TLDs Per Plug-In and Setting Retail Prices Retail prices for domain registration and transfer are set per Domain Registration hosting plan.

Registration periods available are set per TLD for every domain registration plug-in.

Registrar prices are entered per domain registration plug-in for each TLD. Registrar prices are only shown for your reference when you set retail price in a hosting plan.

To set prices for a TLD and select a plug-in to provide domains registration in this TLD, go to Domain Manager > Plug-Ins, select a plug-in and then select the TLDs tab. Click the New TLD button and enter a TLD. Click Next, select registration periods and enter retail prices.

Additional DNS Management Options

Using the DNS template, you can set the pre-defined configuration of resource records in a zone file created on domains registration in Parallels Business Automation - Standard. This provides the automated domain zone management.

DNS templates are bound to Domain Registration hosting plans. When you add a hosting plan (any type except for One-Time Fee Item type), you should always select the corresponding DNS template.

To add a DNS template, please go to the Service Director - Domain Manager > DNS Templates.

To facilitate configuration of services, DNS Template types are introduced. You can create DNS templates that can be used exclusively in a particular hosting plan types.

To register a domain manually, from the Provider Control Center select Service Director > Domain Manager > Domains and click the New Domain button.

You can assign both the default domain and the domain used for trial subscriptions (for customers to create subdomains). To this effect, register a domain for your Provider account and then click on a domain name and edit a domain policy settings.

Advanced domain settings (name servers management, whois servers assignment, etc.) are described in details in the Parallels Business Automation - Standard Provider's Guide.

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Allocating IP Addresses

The IP addresses assets assigned to the Parallels Business Automation - Standard cluster are managed by groups (IP pools).

Provider can add IP pools using the Service Director > IP Manager > IP Pools. The IP Manager allows you to automate the configuration of IP address properties such as addresses of the DNS servers and default gateways for Containers.

You can allocate only static IP addresses. Static IP addresses are allocated permanently and can be released only manually.

IP pools can be assigned to specific resellers or hardware nodes or types of hosting:  Assigning an IP pool to a specific type of hosting means that IP addresses from this IP pool

will be used for of particular type of services. This assignment is exclusive, i.e., it is not possible to assign an IP pool to several types of hosting. You can allocate an IP pool for:

 Virtuozzo Containers and define whether dynamic or static IP addresses allocation is

allowed.

 Name-based Virtuozzo Containers and define whether dynamic or static IP addresses

allocation is allowed.

 Plesk shared hosting.

 Assigning an IP pool to a reseller means that customers of this reseller will use IP addresses

from the IP pool assigned.

 Assigning an IP pool to a Hardware Node means that IP addresses from the IP pool

assigned will be allocated to Containers hosted on this Hardware Node only.This is extremely useful if you have different network segments in your infrastructure. In this case, you can assign particular IP pools to corresponding Hardware Nodes in segment. In case Containers will be migrated from one Hardware Node to another, IP addresses will be reassigned automatically.

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Establishing Connection with Hardware

To establish connection with servers (in terms of Parallels Business Automation - Standard, Nodes) that host Virtuozzo Containers and Plesk domains or run the third-party software, it is necessary to register them in Parallels Business Automation - Standard.

In your Data Center you can register Nodes that run:  Parallels Virtuozzo Containers. Either used for Container hosting provisioning or dedicated

Hardware Nodes owned by your customers or resellers.

 Parallels Plesk Control Panel. Either used for Plesk domains provisioning or dedicated Plesk

servers owned by your customers or resellers.

 Parallels Plesk Sitebuilder. Used for Sitebuilder services provisioning in the frame of

hosting plans you sell.

 Dedicated servers that run the third-party software. These servers cannot be managed on the

system level from the Provider Control Center web-based interface. However, in this case, the Parallels Business Automation - Standard will take care of all the billing matters including creation of dedicated subscription, charging a customer, issuing the renewal order, sending notifications, etc.

Hardware Nodes can be registered and managed using the Service Director. Select the needed manager from the Service Director submenu, then select Nodes, click New Node and register a node.

Note: To establish connection with Nodes you need some specific data. In case of problems or doubts, please contact your network administrator and/or the person who performed Hardware Nodes installation to make sure that the data necessary for Hardware Nodes registration is full and correct.

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Getting Ready to Sell Hosting Services

Using Parallels Business Automation - Standard you can sell hosting service packages grouped by templates and called hosting plans. A hosting plan defines the set of included and additional paid services provided and subscription fees. Usually hosting plan upgrades are allowed. In this case, a hosting plan also carries the information about services available for upgrade (for example, additional IP addresses, new domains, etc.), prices for each additional unit, and the upgrade ceiling (maximal allowed number of units to upgrade).

 When you create a hosting plan, you select one or more subscription periods that are offered

to a customer for this hosting plan. Custom subscription periods can be added in Billing Director > Settings.

When a customer subscribes for a hosting plan services provisioning starts automatically (if a credit limit for a customer account is not overdrawn) in accordance with hosting plan template and subscription period selected by a customer.

As services provisioning starts a special record called subscription is added to the Parallels Business Automation - Standard database. When the subscription period is about to expire, the renewal order can be issued. To facilitate renewing of subscriptions and avoid undesired services termination the flexible (both automated and manual) subscription renewing mechanism is provided in Parallels Business Automation - Standard. Please, refer to the Parallels Business Automation - Standard Provider's guide for more details.

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Basic Notions Used in Parallels Business Automation - Standard Billing

Parallels Business Automation - Standard billing system is supported by the Billing Director that provides financial management of the following client categories: Resellers and Customers. For settlement purposes, Accounts are created for each category. Parallels Business Automation Standard billing provides a single-currency settlement and accounting system. A system-wide currency can be selected per Control Center (one currency for Provider and another currencies for Resellers, the exchange rate can be set per Reseller). In order to change the system-wide currency, select Configuration Director - Miscellaneous Settings - Regional Settings.

Hosting Plan is the basic account unit that used for calculation of money equivalent of services provided. A subscription period can be selected by customers from offered by Hosting Service Provider (one month, three months, six months, and year). Services provided in accordance with a Hosting Plan are paid in advance, in accordance with resource-specific quotes. Resources overusage is paid either in advance or at the end of subscription period.

Note: In Parallels Business Automation - Standard billing, the billing cycle equals to one month by default. This means that statements and resource overusage invoices are generated for each subscription each month. There are no mentions about billing cycles in Parallels Business Automation - Standard web-based interface.

Invoices are being generated in accordance with Subscription terms. Account balance is calculated on the basis of actual resource usage and payment(s) received. Account balance is calculated every hour (by default).

Current Account balance is regularly compared with customer credit limit. Depending on Billing Manager settings and Account balance, the following operations can be performed:

 Notification about negative Account balance can be generated and sent to a customer;  Negative balance and credit limit control, generating reports on Accounts in debt;  Suspending subscriptions associated with Accounts in debt in the case of credit limit

overrun;

 For Virtuozzo Container subscriptions, changing a Container parameters (available

resources limitation) in the case of resource overusage.

Basic Notions

Subscriptions

A Subscription holds terms of contract between Hosting Service Provider and a customer. Changes in Provider prices do not affect terms of Subscription. This means that prices for the Hosting Plan purchased remain changeless up to the end of subscription period.

However, if additional Applications or Containers were purchased, or a Subscription was upgraded to a higher version of the same hosting plan, then Subscription terms may change.

Documents In respect to the Parallels Business Automation - Standard Billing Director, this notion means all

financial documents that exist within the system. The documents may be created by a customer or may be generated automatically. The following documents’ types exist:

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 Orders - the documents that include information about Hosting Plans or additional services

ordered by customers. Orders are generated automatically, after a subscriber orders one or another service;

 Payments - off-line and online payments for hosting services. An Order can be paid by

several payments;

 Invoices - invoices are generated automatically after placing Orders or can be added

manually. Invoices can be paid by parts;

 Credit Invoices - documents that add a certain amount to an account balance and include the

itemization of services or other goods refunded or paid to an account owner.

 Adjustments - adjustments are used for Accounts’ balance adjustment. For example, Credit

Adjustment is applied if a customer was overcharged (to increase the Account balance), and Debit Adjustment is applied if a customer ordered additional services (increase the billed sum and decrease Account balance).

 Payment Requests - financial documents generated after a customer requests an arbitrary

payment to increase his/her account balance.

Each financial document has its total sum and a balance, which allows both applying several payments to one Invoice, and applying single payment to several Invoices.

Balance

Your hosting company balance is the sum of all your customers and resellers account balances. A customer or a reseller account balance is calculated as a total sum of all payments and credit adjustments with a total amount of Invoices, Orders, and Debit Adjustments deducted.

Positive account balance means that an account owner has a certain overpayment, so Provider owes money to a customer. Negative account balance means that a customer or a reseller owes money to Provider. Zero account balance means that neither Provider, nor a customer do not owe money to each other.

Your hosting company balance does not reflect your earnings. It just shows whether your customers owe money to you or you owe money to your customers.

Reports

Billing Manager reports (Collected Cash, Revenue Report, Aged Account/Receivable, etc.).

Notifications

E-mail notifications generated automatically in connection with certain events within Parallels Business Automation - Standard system.

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Setting Up Billing

The Parallels Business Automation - Standard provides the powerful and flexible billing system that allows:

 System-wide currency in the Configuration Director > Miscellaneous Settings > Regional

Settings.

 Re-defining the starting numerical identifiers (IDs) for accounts, financial documents

(orders, invoices, payments, and adjustments), statements, subscriptions and some other objects in the Configuration Director > Miscellaneous Settings > Objects Opening ID.

 Different discount categories (to be assigned to customer accounts) and partner discounts (to

be assigned to resellers) in the Billing Director > Discount Manager.

 Different credit terms that can be assigned per account and define the order of settlements in

the Account Director > Subscription Manager.

 Flexible taxation with ability to use the EU Tax Exemption Code in the Billing Director >

Taxation Manager.

 Ability to automatically apply unused customer payments. This setting can be allowed as a

system-wide one in the Commerce Director > Payment Processing > General Configuration and later enabled or disabled for each particular offline payment.

 More than 40 credit card payment plug-ins in Commerce Director > Online Payments.  Bank accounts management and batch processing in Commerce Manager > Bank Transfers.  Configuring and enabling the fraud screening filters in the Commerce Director > Anti-Fraud

Manager.

 Configuring the recurring billing in the Commerce Director > Payment Processing and

Commerce Director > Online Payments > Setup with the fine-grained transactions approval

tools.

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Creating Hosting Plans

When HSP creates hosting plans, they can make a hosting plan available for Resellers. In this case, Resellers can copy such hosting plans and set own prices. In addition, Resellers can create own hosting plans.

The set of hosting plan types is read-only in respect to its composition, however Provider can rename the hosting types in a way that, for example, seems more descriptive. The names of hosting plan types are shown on the first step of hosing plan creation wizard.

To rename or view the hosting plan types available, go to the Billing Director > Product Manager > Hosting Plans > Hosting Plan Types tab. Then select the type and edit its name.

You can also make use of the multilingual conversion option to switch the language of the hosting plan type into the one you need.

Parallels Business Automation - Standard supports multi-lingual customization for a wide range of fields (website texts, hosting plan names and description, notification templates). You can enter and save texts in any of the languages available for the current Parallels Business Automation - Standard implementation (Bulgarian, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish). To select the language, click one of the buttons with language names tiled below the field you want to enter the text and enter the text in the language selected. For example, click English - and edit the English text, then click German (the English content will be saved and replaced with the German content in the same field) and edit the German text, and so on, for all languages you want to use in your store.

To restore the default hosting plan type name, click the Reset to Default button. Note: It is possible to create the trial-only hosting plans (for the types of hosting the trial period

is allowed for) and so-called one-time-fee hosting plans, which allow selling services or other goods without subscription creation and thus, without renewals.

You can optionally group hosting plans into Hosting Plan Categories.Hosting Plan Categories are the groups of Hosting Plans of one or the same purpose (for example, Shared Webhosting, Corporate Hosting and Mail, etc.). For the initial Parallels Business Automation - Standard configuration you can create several Hosting Plans Categories and in future group actual Hosting Plans by these categories.To create Hosting Plan Categories (or, add a new one), go to the Billing Director > Product Manager > Hosting Plans, select the Hosting Plan Categories tab.

Hosting plans creation in Parallels Business Automation - Standard is rather simple: select the hosting type and follow the corresponding wizard.

To create a hosting plan, go to the Billing Director > Product Manager > Hosting Plans and click the New Hosting Plan button. Select a hosting plan type and follow the wizard. For more details on hosting plans creation, please refer to the Parallels Business Automation - Standard Provider's guide (HTML format available from any Provide COntrol Center screen by the Help link).

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Securing Parallels Business Automation - Standard Tools Using SSL

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) provides a level of security and privacy for those wishing to conduct secure transactions over the Internet.

SSL provides visitors of your website with the confidence to communicate securely via an encrypted session. For companies wishing to conduct secure e-commerce, such as receiving credit card numbers or other sensitive information online, SSL is essential.

For SSL to work a valid signed SSL certificate is required.

Using the Parallels Business Automation - Standard tools, you can generate a self-signed certificate and use it for some time until the certificate “signed” by a trusted external authority: VeriSign or Thawte will be ready. After this you can install the signed certificate again via the Provider Control Center.

 To obtain the SSL certificate:

1. Generate Certificate Requ est in the - Configuration Director > Miscellaneous Settings > SSL

Setup - and select the Certificate Request tab.

2. After the Certificate request is generated, you can do one of the following:  Copy the Certificate Request and send it to the Certificate Authority to obtain the signed

Certificate and import it later;

 Generate self-signed Certificate and use it for some time.

3. Restart Apache on your Management Node. Please note that in this case your Management Node will be not available for some time. So if you already have customers by the moment of importing the SSL Certificate, your customer's Containers will also become offline till Apache on your Management Node restarts.

Please refer to the Parallels Business Automation - Standard Provider's guide for more details on managing SSL.

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Configuring Payment Pug-Ins

Payment plug-ins are shipped as RPM modules independent from Parallels Business Automation - Standard functionality.

The full list of supported payment plug-ins is available at the official Parallels website (http://www.parallels.com/en/products/hspcom

After installation, a plug-in becomes available in Parallels Business Automation - Standard as a selectable type for a new payment plug-in configuration. To add a payment plug-in based on one of a standard configurations, it is enough to go to Commerce Director, proceed to Online Payments > Plug-ins, click New Plug-In, enter a new plug-in configuration name and select a configuration type. After this, a plug-in configuration form appears on the screen. The only thing to do after this - fill the form and save the configuration. The number of plug-ins that can be added on the basis of the same standard configuration is not limited.

To use the configured payment plug-ins you should activate them for your store. In addition, it is possible to flexibly set payment plug-ins availability for Resellers: after a Provider allows a plug-in usage for a Reseller, this Reseller can register their own Merchant account and use a plug-in for their own e-commerce business.

plete/templates/payment/).

In respect to payment plug-ins availability for resellers, each plug-in can be disabled or enabled globally (for all resellers) or a plug-in availability can be set as undefined and then a plug-in availability can be set in reseller account properties, under the Payment Plugins tab.

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Configuring Online Store

Store and website is presented as a set of *.php files that define both the website pages and store steps logic and some other related files and modules. The HTML templates (*.inc files) are provided for each store page. This makes website re-branding and customization much easier. Default files are always stay untouched since customized files a re put into a special directory inside store folder. Customized files simply override the default ones. To get back to default configuration, you should move customized files from a special custom directory into some other location.

Important: Basic migration to a new PHP based store is performed during upgrade (such as keeping header/footer and pages the same), however site/store is to be carefully checked and corrected after upgrade is installed.

Store can be installed on a separate server. Provider can have several stores installed on different servers. Store installation on a separate server requires redefining some constants in store configuration file. Please refer to the Parallels Business Automation - Standard SDK for details.

Note: By default, the full access to store configuration is available for Parallels Business Automation - Standard installation owner, i.e., for provider only. Resellers can use simple tools for store customization provided in web interface under the Store Manager (open/close store, upload some files like logo, header/footer, etc.). Files uploaded in such a way are placed into a special directory for custom files (see directory structure description below) and override the existing default settings for reseller store. However, provider can allow a reseller to have an own store installation, on a separate server, for example. This issue is up to provider policy and provider/reseller relations.

The store simple settings are made via web interface in Commerce Director > Store Manager:

 > Configure Store:

 Open or close store.  Allow or disallow creation of several same named accounts.  Upload User Agreement  Adjust hosting plans listing  Enter referrer question.

 > Reseller Stores:

 Open or close a reseller store.  Allow or disallow creation of several same named accounts in a reseller store.

 > File Manager:

 Upload a default stylesheet file  Upload website header and footer  Upload site logotype  Upload favicon and preloader ison

Starting HSP Business with Parallels Business Automation - Standard 45

By default, store is installed into the /var/opt/hspc-frontend

directory.

Store files directory structure is the following:

Directory Contains files

/var/opt/hspcfrontend

images/

includes/

templates/

vendor/Account_ID/

*.php files for store pages and the stylesheet (*.css) file.

Images used in store and other site pages ( buttons, icons, purchase steps numbers, etc.)

Configuration files.

*.inc files that contain HTML templates for website and store pages.

Directory where customized files must be placed. Account ID is replaced with actual ID of store owner account (provider - always 1 - and reseller accounts 2 and greater). This directory is created automatically for provider account and all reseller accounts.

Note 1: The vendor/1/ directory is created for provider by default. Directories for resellers are created during reseller account creation. Custom files uploaded using the Store Manager > File Manager are placed in these directories.

Note 2: The customization.xml file located in the vendor/ directory defines what store files and directories can be customized using the web interface - the File Manager integrated into the Store Manager.

Starting HSP Business with Parallels Business Automation - Standard 46

Going Live

After you have got ready to accept online payments, configured online store and created hosting plans, you can select an active payment methods and open your store. As you go live, you can also publish the online partner application form to invite resellers.

Selecting Payment Methods Used in Store

The number of payment methods you can use in your online store is limited only by the number of plug-ins you configure.

 To enable one or another payment method do the following:

1. Open the Commerce Director submenu.

2. Select the plug-in:

 To activate a credit card plug-in, click Payment Plug-ins on the Online Payments submenu.

Select a plug-in you want to activate.

 To activate a bank account plug-in, click Payment Plugins on the Bank Transfers submenu.

Select a plug-in you want to activate.

1. After the properties of the selected payment plug-in are displayed, click the Mark as Active button.

 Offline payments:

To allow offline payments in the store, go to Commerce Director > Store Manager > Configure Store -> General Settings. Click the Edit button. Tick Allow offline payment in store and CP

checkbox. Save changes. Enabling SSL for Parallels Business Automation - Standard

You can enable the SSL protocol separately for the Provider Control Center, Reseller Control Canter, Enterprise Control Center, Control Panels, website, and your online store.

Please, enable SSL for your online store before going live. To enable the SSL protocol, go to the Configuration Director > Miscellaneous Settings > SSL

Setup. Select the the Enable SSL tab. You can enable the SSL protocol by checking the Enable SSL in Parallels Business Automation > Standard Web Tools boxes next to the name(s) of the web

tools (Control Centers, Control Panels, store, etc.). Opening Online Store To make your store available over the Web, go to the Commerce Director > Store Manager >

Configure Store, select the General Settings tab. Click the Edit button and check the Store Is Open box. Save settings.

Inviting Resellers

Starting HSP Business with Parallels Business Automation - Standard 47

Resellers are companies that resell HSP services and in general, act as HSP Companies themselves. However, a Reseller does not have own Data Center and hardware that runs Parallels Business Automation - Standard software. Resellers get access to the special set of Parallels Business Automation - Standard tools (Reseller Control Center) and provide services using Internet connection with HSP Management Node.

To enter the Reseller Agreement, to be read by all Resellers before submitting Partner Application, go to the Account Director > Reseller Manager > Terms and Conditions.

C HAPTER 4

What's Next?

After your store is opened and hosting plans are published, you can proceed to the normal course of work: making money using the Parallels Business Automation - Standard hosting automation solution.

In This Chapter

Managing Receivables.......................................................................................................... 48

Supervising the Cash Flow....................................................................................................49

Monitoring the Data Center Resources Usage...................................................................... 51

Checking the Licenses Usage................................................................................................ 52

Daily Activities ..................................................................................................................... 52

Managing Receivables

To view receivables, go to the Billing Director > Receivable > Documents. At your convenience, documents are grouped into separate lists, by types:

 Orders - the documents that include information about Hosting Plans or additional services

ordered by customers. Orders are generated automatically, either when a subscription renewal is needed (for automated renewal the special settings can be made to a subscription) or after a customer places order in online store or in the Control Panel Upgrade Center.

 Invoices - invoices are generated automatically after paying the corresponding Orders, or

manually. Manual creation of invoices is possible in two cases:  When a Provider creates an Abstract Invoice that is not bound to any order, for example

to charge a customer for some additional services.

 When a Provider creates a so-called Credit Invoice that allows increasing a customer

account balance by refunding a customer previous payments with explicit specification of services that were refunded or discounted. Credit invoices work in the same way as credit adjustments, but are accounted in billing reports and have the same numeration (IDs) as all the other invoices.

What's Next? 49

 Payments - off-line and online payments for hosting services. An Order can be paid by

several payments;

 Adjustments - adjustments are used for Accounts’ balance adjustment. For example, Credit

 Payment Requests - requests from customers that want to put some amount on their account

balance, without respect to existence of any unpaid documents. Payment Requests allow customers to enter a credit card or a bank account payment that can be used in future. For a payment to be added, a Payment Request must be manually approved by Provider. Having been approved, a credit card payment request originates a new online payment and a bank account payment request originates an offline payment.

Note: Documents and accounts suspended by the Anti-Fraud filter(s) are collected under Commerce Director > Anti-Fraud Manager > Checklist. You can approve these documents manually for further processing.

Orders and Invoices can be paid both offline and online, both manually from the Provider Control Center and by a customer (by a credit card or a bank account) from the Control Panel.

The documents intended to be paid by credit cards or bank accounts call for specific processing and thus, they are not only enlisted in the list of all receivables, but also grouped separately, under the Commerce Director > Online Payments or Bank Transfers.

Supervising the Cash Flow

Balance

To view the total balance, select Receivable from the Billing Director submenu and then click Balance on the Receivable submenu.

The balance information is grouped under the three tabs:

 Total Receivable shows the following:

 Total Balance. The sum of all your customers and resellers account balances  Accounts total balance. The sum of all customer accounts balances.  Resellers total balance. The sum of all reseller accounts balances

What's Next? 50

 Balance per Account. All customer accounts listing with balance shown for each account.  Balance per Reseller. All reseller accounts listing with balance shown for each account.

When you are browsing an account profile, you can view balance under the Financial Info tab. You can adjust accounts balance by entering credit adjustments or credit invoices (increase) or debit adjustments (decrease) under the Billing History tab within an account details.

Billing Reports

Your hosting company balance does not reflect your earnings. It just shows whether your customers owe money to you or you owe money to your customers. Your actual revenue is shown in Billing Reports under Billing Director > Report Manager.

The detailed accounting reports provide the following information:

 The Revenue Report provides all the revenue information.  Revenue per Plan provides the information about revenue per each hosting plan.  Revenue per Promotion summarizes revenues per promotion (applied to hosting plans) a

provider or a reseller has been got for a selected period of time.

 Revenue forecast allows generating the revenue forecast for selected period os time on the

basis of existing subscriptions.

 The Collected Cash report provides information about the amount collected.  Sign-Up/Go-Away Report presents the rate of new and lost subscriptions for selected period

of time.

 The Aged Account/Receivable report groups all the invoices issued for your customers'

accounts and sorts these invoices by their age (both non-overdue and overdue).

All reports include the Total presentation and Details. The Total tab allows viewing the total revenue report for a particular period of time or for all hosting plans (for Sign-Up/Go-Away report). The Details tab presents revenue report by particular billing documents. Some reports (for example, Revenue per Promotion and Revenue per Plan) include a third tab Revenue per Promotion or Revenue per Plan where you can filter the report down to a particular promotion or a hosting plan.

What's Next? 51

Monitoring the Data Center Resources Usage

The Service Level Manager provides a mechanism for checking the current resource utilization throughout Containers and Hardware Nodes. Using the Service Director > Service Level Manager, you can:

 View the both the current resources consumption and the resources usage history for every

Container or every Hardware Node. Go to the Service Director - Service Level Manager. Select Virtuozzo Container or Hardware Nodes. For every Container or Hardware Node you an view the current resources usage (the Current Values tab) or resource usage history (Statistics tab). This feature is very useful if, for example your customer believes that some resource was under-delivered. In this case you can settle a customer's doubts by checking the total resource usage during a particular period and daily or hourly consumption for a given period of time.

 View traffic usage statistics for third-party dedicated servers.  Set the thresholds in percents for disk space and traffic that when exceeded are reported into

the list of Containers that are approaching limits. To this effect, go to the Service Level Manager - Setup. To view the list of Containers that have exceeded the threshold percentage of promised disk space and traffic, select Container approaching limit.

Note: When traffic or disk space usage for a Container approaches the limits set in the Service Level Manager, the corresponding event is registered by the Parallels Business Automation Standard Event Manager (namely, Traffic is nearly used up and Disk space is nearly used up, to find these events, filter the list by the Subscription object type). Thus, you can attach an action to such events, for example, e-mail notification or SMS message to your staff member.

Finally, you can configure traffic accounting by classes in the Service Director > Service Level

Manager > Traffic Classes.

What's Next? 52

Checking the Licenses Usage

The Parallels Business Automation - Standard License defines the overall number of accounts (Reseller and Customer ones) a Provider can create.

If the Licence capacity is used up, this can result in impossibility for Provider to create a new account. Thus, it is important to check the Parallels Business Automation - Standard License capacity and if needed order and install new License Certificates.

License certificate is issued by Parallels. It can be installed via Parallels Business Automation Standard web-based interface using the Configuration Director > License Manager.

You can check the current usage and unused capacity of Parallels Business Automation Standard License in the Configuration Director > License Manager > Parallels Business Automation > Standard License.

If you are planning to sell Plesk domains in your HSPstore, please install the Parallels Plesk Control Panel licences on each of Plesk Hardware Nodes. And to register Plesk Hardware Node in Parallels Business Automation - Standard you need to install the special agent software (Plesk agent) on each of Plesk nodes. The Plesk agent needs to establish connection between Parallels Business Automation - Standard Management Node and Plesk Hardware Node.

Please, refer to the Parallels Business Automation - Standard Provider's Guide for detailed instructions on how to order and install License certificates.

Note: If you are installing Parallels Business Automation - Standard inside Virtuozzo Container, you will need to install Parallels Virtuozzo Containers License on Hardware Node that hosts this Container using the command line control tools.

Daily Activities

Parallels Business Automation - Standard facilitates and automates many day-to-day tasks in Hosting Service Provider company. Please refer to the Parallels Business Automation - Standard Provider's guide for detailed description of tasks outlined below.

Billing:

 Flexible Subscription Renewal settings. You can:

 Enable the automated generation of a renewal order. In this case, the renewal order will

be generated before the subscription expiration date, in accordance with the renewal order period defined in the credit terms and for the subscription period defined by you in the subscription renewal settings. Go to the Account Director > Subscription Manager >

Subscriptions. Select a subscription and click the Renewal Settings button. Check the Create renewal order automatically box.

 Generate the renewal order manually. In this case, you also can generate the renewal

order for the custom subscription period. To create renewal order for the same period as it was before, go to the Account Director > Subscription Manager > Subscriptions.. Select a subscription and click the Generate Renewal Order button.

What's Next? 53

 Register or transfer domains registered outside Parallels Bu siness Automation - Standard.

This allows synchronizing an actual domain expiration date with a domain subscription in Parallels Business Automation - Standard. After this, Parallels Business Automation Standard will renew domain registration automatically via its domain registration plugins.

What's Next? 54

 Transaction log includes the detailed data about absolutely all online transactions (successful

or failed) performed within Parallels Business Automation - Standard. To view transaction log, go to the Commerce Director > Online Payments or Bank Transfers > Transaction Log.

 Adding credit cards types to accept. Most payment plug-ins support selection of credit cards

types (including the debit cards like Solo and Switch). Go to the Commerce Director > Online Payments > Payment Plugins, select a plug-in and edit the credit cards set to be accepted.

 Manage affiliate programs, check statistics. Marketing Director provides means for creating

online marketing campaigns that result in visits to your site/store. Parallels Business Automation - Standard will track the hits as well as orders received as a result of your different campaigns. To add a marketing campaign, go to the Marketing Director Campaign Manager > Campaigns.

 Create and publish promotions.Promotions are discount periods for sale of one or a several

Hosting Plans which are periodically announced by Hosting Service Provider or Reseller. You can also create promotions being activated by a coupon code. A promotion can give different discount for different subscription periods. To create a promotion, go to the Billing Director > Discount Manager > Promotions.

Channel Sales Check partner applications in the Account Director > Reseller Manager, manage resellers (check

resellers IP Pools allocation in the IP Manager, create hosting plans available for copying by resellers, check Resellers balance, manage Resellers stores, hide Resellers store URL).

Administration  Service Monitor. Allows tracking in a real time the status of all the services that are critical

for Parallels Business Automation - Standard viability (support database, process orders, etc.) The service monitor controls the status of these services and if one of them stops, tries to immediately start them automatically. If the Service Monitor fails to start one of these services, it issues the system warning visible at any screen of Parallels Business Automation

- Standard Control Center, so that the Control Center administrator could know about the outage and fix it. To view the status of Parallels Business Automation - Standard vital services in real time, go to the Configuration Director > Up2date Manager > Service Monitor. Click Check Now.

 Up2D

ate Manager is a useful and simple tool that allows you to check whether your Parallels

Business Automation - Standard version is up-to-date and receive information about the available Parallels Business Automation - Standard updates and hotfixes.

 The Integrity Checker allows checking the Parallels Business Automation - Standard

database integrity. To use this tool, click Support on the left menu and then select the Integrity Checker tab. For example, possible inconsistencies in HSP balance calculation, accounts profile, subscriptions details (e.g., possible accidental mismatches in hosting plans assignment, subscriptions ownership, payables issuer data, etc).

 During the normal course of work, it is often necessary to track all the actions performed

within your Parallels Business Automation - Standard system. To view action logs, click Action Log on the left menu.The Parallels Business Automation - Standard logs are stored on the Management Node in the /var/log/hspc/hspc.log file.You can set the log level and log messages format in the Configuration Director > Logging and Errors > Log Settings.

 Messenger. Set the Provider Account contact e-mail addresses and check mail sent by

Parallels Business Automation - Standard messenger.

What's Next? 55

 Create more users allowed to log in to Provider Control Center. You can adjust the access

permissions for roles available for users registered in Provider account (staff members) in the Configuration Director > Security Manager > Permissions, register users in Provider account and assign these roles to your staff members.

 Manage the users password strength. You can set up the length and other strengthening

features for passwords used to log in to Parallels Business Automation - Standard Control Centers and Control Panels. The password enhancement also sets the rules for Container users passwords.The idea is simple: try to prevent users from choosing passwords that could be guessed by "Crack" by filtering them out. To set the passwords strength, go to the Configuration Director > Security Manager > Setup

Customer Care  Trouble Ticket System. Parallels Business Automation - Standard provides an integrated

trouble ticketing system that allows reporting and answering customers' problems directly through the interface. To set up the Trouble Ticket System, please go to the Account Director > Support Manager > Setup. If you would like to use an external helpdesk (currently, Cerberus and Kayako are supported), you can switch to one of the supported helpdesks very quickly, by entering the helpdesk server requisites into the Support Manager > Setup form.

 Manage Events and notifications. Parallels Business Automation - Standard provides an

opportunity of tracking particular events that happen within the system and configure e-mail notifications and other actions (including scripts execution) in connection with each event. E-mail notifications and scripts can be configured using Configuration Director > Event Manager > Events.

 Mass mailer. Using the Mass Mailer you can send the massive e-mail notifications to your

resellers and customers. If needed, you can re-send the mass mail. To send a mass mail, go to the Marketing Director > Announcement Manager.

C HAPTER 5

Getting Technical Support

Parallels provides installation assistance for Parallels Business Automation - Standard. Assistance with installation is offered via e-mail. The full information about Parallels Business Automation - Standard support and Parallels Business Automation - Standard documentation in HTML format is available at our website (http://www.parallels.com/en/products/hspcomplete/docs/).

In This Chapter

An Overview of Parallels Technical Support........................................................................ 56

Questions for Technical Support........................................................................................... 56

How to Send Support Questions........................................................................................... 57

An Overview of Parallels Technical Support

Parallels Support will attempt to answer any relevant questions you may have before the installation process is initiated. This includes the following:

 Pre-requisites list;  Hardware compatibility;  Software compatibility.

Questions for Technical Support

In most cases, support team must rely on customer observations and communications with the customer in order to diagnose and solve the problem. Therefore, the detailed problem report is extremely important. Please, do mention the following:

 Symptoms of the problem;  When the problem began including the circumstances of the failure;  Any changes you made to your system;  Other information that may be relevant to your situation, such as the installation method;  Specific hardware devices that may be relevant to your problem.

Getting Technical Support 57

How to Send Support Questions

Please, send your questions to support team by e-mail: hsvz-support@parallels.com.

If you need to contact us - just call us or visit one of our offices. Information about phone numbers, contact persons and office addresses is available on the contact page at http://www.parallels.com/en/contact/.

Index

About This Guide • 7 Allocating IP Addresses • 35 Looking into Reseller Control Center • 25 An Overview of Parallels Technical Support •

Audience • 7

Basic Notions Used in Parallels Business

Automation - Standard Bill

Browsers Compatible with Parallels Business

Automation - Standard • 15

ing • 38

Checking the Licenses Usage • 52 Configurin

Hardware • 31 Parallels Busi

Configurin Connecting to Parallels Business Automation -

Standard Browser-Based Tools • 17 Prefac Cop Creating Hosting Plans •

g Data Center and Connecting

g Online Store • 44 g Payment Pug-Ins • 43

yright Notice • 5

Daily Activities • 52

Establishing Connection with Hardware • 36

Getting Acquainted with Provider Control

Center • Getting Ready to Sell Hosting Services • 37 Getting Technical Support Going Live •

• 56

How to Send Support Questions • 57

Initial Settings • 19

Inspecting Cu

Managing Receivables • 48 Meet the Parallels Business Autom

Standard • 8

Monitoring the Data Cent

Parallels Business Automation - Standard

Advantages • 8

Parallels Busi

Deployment Scenario • 11

Interface Features • 11 Configurin

Parallels Busi

Tools • 13

e • 6

Questions for Technical Support • 56

Registering Users and Setting Access

Perm

Securing Parallels Business Automation -

Standard Tools Using SSL • 42 Feedback • 7 Setting Up Billing • 40 Setting Up Domains Registration • Starting HSP Business with Parallels Business

Automation - Standard • 16 Supervising t

Typographical Conventions • 6

What's Next? • 48

stomer Control Panel • 26

ation -

er Resources Usage •

ness Automation - Standard

issions • 28

he Cash Flow • 49

Parallels BUSINESS AUTOMATION Getting Started Guide

Specifications and Main Features

Frequently Asked Questions

User Manual

Preface

Typographical Conventions

Feedback

About This Guide

Audience

Navigation

Main Screen

Adding a Comment to the Parallels Business Automation - Standard Object

Browsers Compatible with Parallels Business Automation - Standard

Starting HSP Business with Parallels Business Automation - Standard

Initial Settings

Getting Acquainted with Provider Control Center

Looking into Reseller Control Center

Inspecting Customer Control Panel

Registering Users and Setting Access Permissions

Configuring Data Center and Connecting Hardware

Setting Up Domains Registration

Allocating IP Addresses

Establishing Connection with Hardware

Getting Ready to Sell Hosting Services

Basic Notions Used in Parallels Business Automation - Standard Billing

Setting Up Billing

Creating Hosting Plans

Securing Parallels Business Automation - Standard Tools Using SSL

Configuring Payment Pug-Ins

Configuring Online Store

Going Live

What's Next?

Managing Receivables

Supervising the Cash Flow

Monitoring the Data Center Resources Usage

Checking the Licenses Usage

Daily Activities

Getting Technical Support

An Overview of Parallels Technical Support

Questions for Technical Support

How to Send Support Questions

Index